TANIEL

Constantinople, April 24 1915. As the British prepared their landings in nearby Gallipoli, hundreds of arrest warrants are issued across the city. The arrival of police at poet Taniel Varoujan’s door would shatter his home, destroy his work and his family would never see him again.

Film Noir in style, “Taniel” pays homage to the era of dramatic filmmaking with extreme lighting and camera angles. The narrative is mostly heard through poetry, with Varoujan poems in Armenian expressing the emotions in each of the scenes; and narrative poetry in English delivered with an emotive depth of feeling by Sean Bean.

Taniel is currently taking part in the film festival circuit through 2018. It won two awards at the Bermuda International Film Festival and and Best Short Film award at ARPA International Film Festival. The film was also selected by a number of festivals all over the world, including Sydney, Toronto, Bucharest, Washington DC etc, as well as by the Golden Apricot International Film Festival, Shetland’s Screenplay Festival, curated by Mark Kermode; and one of the oldest festivals in Europe in Montecatini. Taniel also had some very special screenings at The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan and at the iconic Lincoln Center in New York.

Jean Vartan Ekmekjian, who recently revived Hayreniqi Dzayn (Voice of the Homeland), Pan Armenian Writers’ Unions’ official newspaper, visited our screening at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute. Read his review of the film and its backstory here.